With the release of SAP HANA last summer SAP has started to trigger fundamental changes and innovations with respect to how data – especially big data – is treated and analyzed. The first six months show the tremendous success and impact SAP HANA has on the market, enabling customers to take the next step satisfying their analytical needs, including near real-time scenarios.

It all started with SAP HANA SP1, the so called sidecar approach, where SAP HANA is used as a separate instance besides the SAP ECC (or any other source system), leaving existing Data Warehouse solutions such as SAP NetWeaver BW untouched. This scenario allows for specific analytical and even operational needs to be addressed and SAP delivers several Rapid Deployment Solutions (RDS) such as Smart Meter Analytics of the CO-PA Accelerator. itelligence is also involved in creating proprietary RDS solutions to meet customers’ needs.

With the release of SAP HANA SP3 a new major scenario is now available, too. SAP HANA as underlying database for SAP BW. What does this mean? Well, it’s the kick start for the SAP BW, allowing substantial data compression (up to factor 5), improved data load processes (up to 2.5 times faster) and of course tremendous performance gains on the reporting end of the process. One could argue that this last advantage is not new to SAP HANA, this could already be achieved by using the BW Accelerator (BWA). However, the usage of SAP HANA simplifies the overall architecture and therefore increases the speed from the time the data is extracted from the sources until it is available for reporting even further.

Initially SAP HANA was mainly targeted at the LE market, but now there’s good news for the midmarket, too:

SAP has announced a SAP HANA package for the midmarket making a very attractive offering for this market segment. We, itelligence, see a huge potential there and we are currently developing multiple offerings from SAP HANA Test Drives to content and RDS packages as mentioned above. This way customers can leverage the cutting-edge technology paired with the extensive and proven industry and midmarket expertise that itelligence is well known to deliver.

PS: Vishal Sikka, is still looking for someone to join Yodobashi in the 100k club. Are you in for this challenge?